Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [122]
Try a sample Leadville evening.
The light was gentle, a mixture of firelight and the soft radiance of two Moderateur lamps bought at a frightening price at Daniel and Fisher’s. The cots were curtained off, the table was shoved against the wall, which was hung with the geological maps of the King Survey. Susan had put these up, not Oliver; and they were for decoration, not study. Frank was sitting on the floor with his chin on his knees and the firelight in his eyes. Between stove and wall Pricey sat reading, and the noise of his rocking creaked in the lulls of their talk like an overindustrious cricket.
“What are you reading that’s so absorbing, Pricey?” Susan said.
Pricey did not hear her. His tiny feet in their clumsy boots came down tippy-toe, pushed against the floor, and floated upward again. His nose was ten inches from the page. His hand moved, a page turned, his feet came down, pushed, floated upward. The floor squeaked. They watched him, smiling among themselves.
“I think it’s a total lack of vanity,” Oliver said. “Anybody else who hears his name will look up, it’ll jar him a little. Not Pricey, not when he’s reading. Look at him, like a kid on a rockinghorse.”
“I saw him riding that old Minnie mule along the road the other day with his nose in a book,” Frank said. “Mule could have stumbled and tossed him down a shaft, he’d have gone right on reading. Maybe he’d have wondered why it got dark all of a sudden.”
Oliver raised his voice slightly to say, “I may have to ask him not to come over here any more. He’ll rock every nail out of the floor.”
They projected their joking toward Pricey and he heard nothing. Creak creak, creak creak. The little boots tapped the planks, floated upward. Pricey turned another page. Out of her suppressed laughter Susan shook her head at the other two. Don’t laugh at him. Don’t make fun.
Oliver said, “There’s one thing the oblivious Pricey doesn’t know. That rocker creeps. Five minutes more and he’ll be in the fire.”
“I doubt if it’d get his attention,” Frank said.
With preposterous daintiness the boots came down, tapped the planks, rose, hung, descended. CREAK creak, CREAK creak. Wetting his thumb, Pricey turned another page.
“I swear,” Oliver said, and stood up. “This is serious.”
He stepped along the wall to the bookcase that stood behind Pricey’s chair. Pricey hunched his shoulders aside slightly to make passage room, and a small interrogative humming issued from his nose, but he did not look up. The rockers rose and fell. Standing close behind him, Oliver took in each hand a volume of the King Survey reports-great quartos that ran six pounds to the book, the concentrated learning of King, Prager, Emmons, the Hague brothers, a dozen others who had been Oliver’s guides and models.
For a moment Susan was afraid he was going to drop the books on Pricey’s unconscious head, and she made a restraining motion. But Oliver only stood a moment, adjusting to Pricey’s rhythm, and then stooped quickly and shoved a book under each rocker.
Pricey stopped with a jolt, his head snapped back, his jaw snapped shut. He looked up startled into their laughter. His face went pink, his pale eyes circled wildly looking for a focus. “S-s-s-sorry!” he said. “What?”–and then the long acceptant “hawwwww!” like a groan.
Yet only a day or two after that, this same Pricey showed Susan some of the incongruous possibilities of Leadville. He had been the one delegated to take her riding, and they were down on the Lake Fork of the Arkansas at a place where they must ford. It was a time of high water, the infant Arkansas was swift and curly. “Come on, Pricey!” Susan called, and quirted her horse into the water.
The creek broke against his knees, and then as he surged carefully ahead, feeling for footing, against his shoulder. His hoofs were delicate among the slippery bottom stones. Susan pulled her foot out of the stirrup of the sidesaddle and sat precariously, thrilled and dazzled by the cold rush going underneath. When the water shallowed, the horse lunged out, shedding great drops, and as she felt for the stirrup she turned to see how Pricey was making it. There he came, strangling the horn with both hands. From midstream he sent her a sweet, desperate smile.